Digital video is readily reproduced and distributed over information networks. However, these attractive properties lead to problems enforcing copyright protection. As a result, creators and distributors of digital video are hesitant to provide access to their digital intellectual property. Digital watermarking has been proposed as a means to identify the owner and distribution path of digital data. Digital watermarks address this issue by embedding owner identification directly into the digital data itself. The information is embedded by making small modifications to the pixels in each video frame. When the ownership of a video is in question, the information can be extracted to completely characterize the owner or distributor of the data.
Video watermarking introduces issues that generally do not have a counterpart in images and audio. Video signals are highly redundant by nature, with many frames visually similar to each other. Due to large amounts of data and inherent redundancy between frames, video signals are highly susceptible to pirate attacks, including frame averaging, frame dropping, interpolation, statistical analysis, etc. Many of these attacks may be accomplished with little damage to the video signal. A video watermark must handle such attacks. Furthermore, it should identify any image created from one or more frames in the video.
Furthermore, to be useful, a watermark must be perceptually invisible, statistically undetectable, robust to distortions applied to the host video, and able to resolve multiple ownership claims. Some watermarking techniques modify spatial/temporal data samples, while others modify transform coefficients. A particular problem afflicting all prior art techniques, however, is the resolution of rightful ownership of digital data when multiple ownership claims are made, i.e., the deadlock problem. Watermarking schemes that do not use the original data set to detect the watermark are most vulnerable to deadlock. A pirate simply adds his or her watermark to the watermarked data. It is then impossible to establish who watermarked the data first.
Watermarking procedures that require the original data set for watermark detection also suffer from deadlocks. In such schemes, a party other than the owner may counterfeit a watermark by "subtracting off" a second watermark from the publicly available data and claim the result to be his or her original. This second watermark allows the pirate to claim copyright ownership since he or she can show that both the publicly available data and the original of the rightful owner contain a copy of their counterfeit watermark.
There is a need, therefore, for watermarking procedures applicable to video digital data that do not suffer from the described shortcomings, disadvantages and problems.